Attitude Control Of Small UAV Based On Smartphone Motion Sensing

The development of small unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) is gaining more and more worldwide attention. The small UAVs have been widely applied in kinds of fields, such as air transportation, aerial photography, agriculture. At the same time, smartphone have spread all of the world. With the benefit of the different kinds of the sensors in the smartphone, we can design numerous applications. To combine the small UAV and smartphone together, this dissertation implements the technology that attitude control of the small UAV based on smartphone motion sensingIn order to accurately control the attitude of the small UAVs, we need ensure the accuracy and stability of the attitude estimation of the smartphone. But due to the large measurement error of the low-cost sensors in the smartphone, this would lead to large attitude estimation errors. So this dissertation firstly make the research of the sensors calibration algorithm, including magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope, and proposed a set of sensors calibration strategy without the help of the external devices. Then, to fuse the measurements from the three kinds calibrated sensors, this dissertation proposed an attitude estimation algorithm based on the optimized gradient-descent algorithm. It can stably and accurately estimates the attitude of the smartphone. Finally, this dissertation design a wireless data communication device to transmit the data from the smartphone to the small UAV so that the attitude of the small UAV can be controlled by smartphone.This dissertation did the flight experiments using the APM copter controller and Open Pilot copter controller, to validate the technology that the smart phone motion sensing based attitude control of the small UAV. From the results of the experiments, the stability, the abilities of real-time and the accuracy of the designed control method have been fully proved, and also with the extension in functions.